The Formation of a Flower: Three Levels Down

The mountain was walked through as a single search. This chapter asks for something more sustained: to take one ordinary object, a red flower, and walk all the way down through it, level by level, until nothing is left standing that was not already shown, at each step, to need nothing solid beneath it. The purpose is not to discover anything new. Every piece used here has already been built in earlier chapters. The purpose is to show these pieces working together, on a single object, so that the whole formation — physical and mental together — can be seen at once rather than in scattered fragments across many examples.

One caution before beginning. This is not a reduction to physical matter, and it is not a reduction to mind. Both of those would simply relocate the substrate rather than eliminate it — physicalism putting it in atoms and neurons, idealism putting it in consciousness or mind-stuff. What follows tries to do something harder and, I think, more honest: take the substrate view off the table entirely, on both sides, and show that a vivid, richly detailed, convincing 'solidly real' flower can be fully accounted for without positing a substrate anywhere, physical or mental, underneath any part of it.

Level One: The Vivid Qualia Themselves

Look at the flower, and notice what is actually there before any word is spoken—though never before it is discriminated, for discrimination is already mingled with the seeing. Red. A particular texture to the petals, faintly resistant against a fingertip. A scent, sweet and specific, distinguishable in an instant from the scent of any other flower. Perhaps a faint sound, if a petal brushes against another in the wind. Each of these arrives complete as appearance, sharing nothing with the others. The redness carries no trace of the texture. The scent carries nothing of the sound. This is the no-residue finding, already established earlier in this book, now simply being applied deliberately, one modality at a time, to a single object rather than to sense experience in general.

It is worth actually doing this rather than only reading about it. Attend to the red, only the red, and ask what makes it exactly this red and not some other. The honest answer is contrast — this red against the green of the stem, against the colour of whatever is behind it. Attend to the texture, only the texture, and ask the same question. The honest answer, again, is contrast — this resistance against the resistance of your own fingertip, this particular give against what firmness or softness would feel like instead. Every quale, examined this closely, turns out to be already relational, already dependent on what it is not, from the very first instant it appears. There is no colour sitting there first, waiting to be contrasted afterwards. But this should not be pushed further than it can bear: the point is not that redness simply is contrast, as though a vivid quale could be reduced without remainder to a relation. The point is narrower and more honest. Red cannot be established independently of the conditions and differentiations through which this particular redness appears. What red ultimately is, apart from those conditions, is not being answered here. It does not need to be. The radiance itself is left untouched by this — it is only the assumption that the radiance must first be something on its own, prior to and apart from its conditions, that is being set aside.

This is the first level down, and it already contains something important: none of these qualities are substrates. None of them are 'the flower' waiting underneath the others. Redness is not a coat of paint applied to a pre-existing flower-object. It is one dependently arisen event among several, each complete as appearance, each empty of anything beneath it, each requiring nothing further to be exactly and vividly what it is.

The Taste of Radiance: Neither Internal Nor External

Everything said so far about the qualia has been true, and none of it has yet touched the thing itself. No-residue, contrast, exhaustive conditionality — these describe the structure of the redness, the texture, the scent. They do not yet ask the reader to actually taste the redness, and this chapter cannot afford to skip that step, because the structure was never the point. The point is what is actually here: this red, blazing quietly on its own, not waiting to be explained before it is allowed to be this vivid. This scent, arriving whole, already fully itself, asking nothing of the mind before it is permitted to be this fragrant. Look at the red again, and do not analyse it this time. Just let it be exactly as radiant as it already is. That radiance was never added afterwards, as a kind of glow layered on top of a duller, more basic sensory fact. It is not on top of anything. It is the whole of what is there.

Once this is actually tasted rather than only reasoned about, a question becomes unavoidable, and it is worth sitting with directly rather than rushing past: this radiance — is it internal or external? The habit is to assume it must be one or the other. Either the redness is really out there, an objective property belonging to the flower independent of anyone looking, and what happens in here is just a private copy of it, dimmer and derivative. Or the redness is really in here, a mental event, a quale generated by the brain, and what is out there is just colourless, odourless physical stuff that the mind paints over afterwards. Almost every unexamined assumption about perception picks one of these two options without ever asking whether the question itself is sound.

It is not sound, and this chapter has already shown why, though not yet applied to this exact point. Before going further, one thing needs to be said plainly, because it is easy to grant it too much ground by accident in the next few sentences: what conventional physics describes as reflectance, illumination, receptor sensitivity, and neural activity constrains what appears — alter those conditions and the appearance changes — but constraining an appearance is not the same as being a deeper, more real substrate underneath it. These conditions are as fully part of the dependently arisen formation as the redness itself, not a more solid layer standing behind it.

With that said, the radiance cannot simply be external. It does not sit on the flower independent of any perceiving, waiting to be found by anyone who happens by — it requires a sense faculty, a specific range of photoreceptor sensitivity, cognitive contact, attention, exactly the kind of conditions this book has already traced. Without the relevant visual conditions, this redness does not arise. But the radiance cannot simply be internal either, manufactured wholesale by a private inner theater with no constraint from anything outside it. Change the wavelength of light striking the flower, or the surface properties reflecting it, and the appearing redness changes accordingly, in ways no private hallucination would be bound to respect. The redness is not copied in from outside, and it is not generated from inside with nothing outside to answer to. It arises exactly where the distinction between inside and outside was assumed to already exist, and finds no such boundary actually there to cross.

This is the same finding already reached elsewhere in this book, arrived at now by taste rather than by argument. There is no gap between the physical and the felt for a medium to bridge, because there were never two separately existing banks, one called external matter and one called internal mind, standing on either side of the radiance waiting to be connected. The habit of sorting every appearance into 'out there, in the world' or 'in here, in my head' is a container-grammar inherited long before it was ever examined — the same grammar that assumed 'here' and 'now' were a pre-given stage for the apple to appear on, rather than dependently designated together with the appearing itself. The radiance of this red is exactly that same case, tasted directly rather than reasoned towards: not external, not internal, because 'external' and 'internal' were never two independently established containers with a fact of the matter about which one the radiance belongs to. There is simply the appearing, vivid and immediate, and no boundary it must fall on one side of.

This matters beyond the flower. The same unexamined sorting is applied, almost automatically, to thought — assumed internal, private, happening in here, as opposed to the flower, assumed external, public, happening out there. Once the boundary has been shown not to hold for the flower's radiance, it cannot be quietly reinstated for thought a few pages later without the same examination. This is worth holding in mind going into the next level, where imputation — the very thing most readily assumed to be an internal, mental add-on to an external, physical flower — comes under exactly the same scrutiny.

Level Two: Imputation — Where Is the 'Flowerness'?

These residue-free qualities appear as a single object called 'flower', and it is worth searching for that binding the same way the chariot's parts were searched, because the search fails in exactly the same way and for exactly the same reason.

Strip the attributes one at a time, as Nāgasena stripped the chariot's parts, and ask where the flowerness is. Is it the red? No — a white flower is still a flower, so redness cannot be what flowerness consists of. Is it the texture? No — flowers vary enormously in texture, from silken to coarse, and all of them remain flowers. Is it the scent? Many flowers have almost none, and are still flowers without dispute. Is it the shape? Shape varies as freely as everything else. Is it the sum of all of these, added together into one bundle? A mere heap of qualities, as with the chariot's mere collection of parts, is not yet an owner of them — something is still missing to make the heap into one thing rather than a scattering, and nothing has been found that supplies that missing piece. Is it something apart from all of these qualities, detected independently of them, waiting beneath them to be discovered once the qualities are set aside? Nothing of the kind has ever been found, by anyone, looking.

The search fails completely, and it fails in the identical structure every such search has failed throughout this book. This is not merely unfindability restated, however. Something more specific is being shown here: it is not that flowerness is hiding somewhere clever. It is that 'flower' was never a name for a hidden ingredient standing behind red, texture, scent, and shape. It is a name for their co-arising — for the fact that this particular cluster of insubstantial, residue-free qualities arises together, reliably, as a pattern designated together with its recognition. The label does not point at anything beneath the pattern; pattern and label are not two. This is dependent designation exactly as this book has used the term throughout: not thing-first, label-second, but label and cluster arising together, inseparably, as one event described from two angles.

Effortless Binding: No Manager Either

Reach for the flower, or an apple beside it, and notice that the redness, texture, and scent do not arrive as separate data later stitched together through conscious effort. They arrive already bound, as one thing, without labor. It would be a mistake, though, to build an argument on the felt absence of that labor. A great deal of processing plainly does occur beneath conscious awareness — the visual system alone performs enormous amounts of unconscious work before anything reaches attention at all — and the mere fact that this processing is not consciously witnessed proves nothing about whether it happens. That argument would not hold up, and it does not need to be made.

What can be shown, and what does not depend on any claim about how much processing occurs, is this: however much processing neuroscience eventually identifies — layers of it, entirely unconscious, exactly as complex as any account of vision requires — nowhere within that processing does an independently existing processor, integrator, manager, or owner need to be posited to explain the result. This is not a claim that binding happens without cause or without mechanism. It is the same claim already made about the flower itself, now made about whatever does the perceiving: process as much as is needed, and still no bearer of the process is required, standing behind it, doing the integrating. Just as no substrate was found holding the flower's qualities together from outside, no substantial integrator is found holding them together from inside either — not because nothing happens, but because nothing that happens ever needs a self-existing owner to happen to. This is anatta again, applied here to whatever binds a perception together rather than to the perception's content.

Level Three: The Conventional, Shared World

A further question remains, and it is the one that gives the 'solidly real' impression its real force: if flowerness is only a pattern, dependently designated, why does everyone seem to see the same flower? Why does agreement feel like such strong evidence of an independently existing object out there, waiting to be found by anyone who looks?

As with the mountain, the agreement is real, but it is not evidence of what it seems to be evidence of. Human bodies share closely similar sensory apparatus — similar eyes, similar photoreceptor sensitivities, similar auditory ranges, similar processing structures shaped by a shared evolutionary and developmental history. It is worth being careful here about what is actually being claimed. Nobody has access to another person's private redness, and no argument in this book depends on claiming that everyone's inner quale of red is secretly identical. What can actually be observed, and what the argument needs, is convergence at the level of discrimination, naming, pointing, behaviour, and functional interaction: people with functioning human vision reliably discriminate the same boundary as the flower's edge, apply the same word to the same region, and interact with it in matching ways. This convergence is not detection of one independently existing object that all these observers happen to be looking at. It demonstrates stable conditional regularity — similar apparatus, meeting similar conditions, producing similar discriminations and responses — and it does not require, or provide evidence for, an intrinsically self-existing flower standing behind that regularity. Objectivity, in other words, is not evidence for intrinsic existence. It is the coherence of dependent arising — conditions converging closely enough, across enough observers, to produce an impression indistinguishable, from the inside, from having found something independently there. A creature with a different sensory apparatus — a bee, discriminating ultraviolet patterns invisible to a human eye, or a dog, for whom scent rather than colour drives the relevant discrimination — would not be responding to an impoverished version of the same flower. It would be enacting a different flower, formed from a different apparatus, with conditions that are themselves designated only within each such meeting.

Layered onto this shared sensory convergence is a further convention: language. The word 'flower', and the specific boundary it draws — this counts, that does not, a wilted petal on the ground no longer quite counts — is itself a shared agreement, passed down, taught, reinforced by a community of language users who learned to apply the label to the same recognized pattern in roughly the same circumstances. This is a second layer of convention stacked on top of the first: shared sensory apparatus producing convergent discriminations and appearances, and shared language producing convergent designation of those discriminations. Neither layer requires, or provides evidence for, an independently existing essence underneath either the appearance or the designation.

Three levels down, and nothing solid has been required at any point: insubstantial, residue-free vivid qualia; a dependently designated pattern binding them, arising together with them rather than added afterwards; and a conventional, intersubjective agreement, built from shared apparatus and shared language, that makes the pattern feel discovered rather than formed. Together, these three levels are sufficient to produce the full, vivid, thoroughly convincing impression of a solidly real flower sitting there in the world, without any of the three levels containing, requiring, or pointing towards a substance, essence, or substrate anywhere in the stack.

The Mind Side Must Be Included, Not Assumed

It would be a serious error to stop here and treat this as an account of how physical matter gets dressed up in perception — as though the flower's atoms were the real, solid substrate, and everything described above were merely the mind's colourful gloss painted over that more fundamental physical reality. That would not eliminate the substrate view. It would simply relocate it to physics and leave it completely unexamined there, which is exactly the move this book has refused from its opening chapters onward.

The same three-level analysis applies, without modification, to the apparatus doing the perceiving. There is no independently existing 'mind' or 'consciousness' sitting behind the eye, the optic nerve, and the visual cortex, producing the experience of red the way a projector produces an image on a screen. Search for that mind the same way the chariot and the flower were searched, and the same failure recurs: not found in the eye, not found in the nerve, not found in the visual cortex, not found in some further, subtler faculty standing behind all of these, watching them work. What is actually present, at every point in the perceiving apparatus, is the same pattern already seen twice: conditions arising together, dependently designated as 'seeing', with no seer required to be found underneath the seeing for the seeing to occur. This is anatta, applied here specifically to the perceiving side of the flower's formation rather than to the flower itself, and it needs to be applied here explicitly, or the whole analysis silently smuggles a mental substrate back in through the very apparatus doing the perceiving.

This is why the account offered here is neither physicalist nor idealist, and it is worth being exact about why those two options, so often treated as the only available choices, both fail in the same way. Physicalism explains the flower by grounding it in matter, treated as the one substrate genuinely and independently real, with perception as a secondary, derivative gloss added on top. Idealism explains the flower by grounding it in mind, treated as the one substrate genuinely and independently real, with matter as the secondary, derivative appearance within it. Both keep exactly one substrate standing and demote the other side to a lesser status. What this chapter has tried to show is that neither side needs to be kept standing. The flower's redness does not require matter as its hidden support, and it does not require mind as its hidden support either. It requires conditions — physical and mental, sense faculty and object-basis and attention, none of them privileged as more fundamental than the others — arising together, dependently designated, all the way through.

A related trap deserves to be named directly, because it is easy to walk straight into it while believing the substrate view has already been fully refused. Nothing in this chapter denies that conventional physics, biology, or neuroscience offer precise, functionally valid descriptions of the conditions under which a flower is seen, smelled, and recognized. The trap is not in using these descriptions. It is in the further, quiet step of declaring that the experienced red flower is 'really' electromagnetic radiation at a certain wavelength, or 'really' a pattern of neural firing, and treating that redescription as though it had located the substrate the rest of this chapter failed to find. It has not. It has simply answered a functional question — under what conditions does this appearance reliably occur — as though it were an ontological one — what does this appearance ultimately, substantially consist of. Wavelength and neural activity are conditions among the many already discussed, not a deeper layer discovered underneath them. Relocating the substrate into physics, and calling the relocation an explanation, is the same move as relocating it into consciousness and calling that idealism. Both smuggle back in, through the side door, exactly what the front door has already refused to admit.

Simultaneity, Not Sequence

It is tempting, describing this in prose, to make the three levels sound like a strict sequence — first the qualia, then the imputation, then the convention — and it is worth being exact about what should and should not be said instead. It would overreach to claim that all three levels are simultaneously required for every appearance whatsoever. They are not. A preverbal infant plainly has vivid visual experience without possessing the word 'flower'. A solitary observer does not need other people currently perceiving the same object for a visual formation to occur. An animal encounters colour and shape without human linguistic convention entering into it at all. Claiming otherwise would be claiming more than this chapter can support, and more than it needs to.

What can be said, and what the argument actually depends on, is narrower and more defensible: these three levels are analytically distinguishable, but none of them constitutes an ontological foundation underneath the others. Bare sensory appearance does not require the word 'flower' to occur, though it is never free of discrimination and framing. Recognizing something as an instance of a category requires prior conditioning and discrimination, but not yet a linguistic community. The fully articulated human event — this, here, a red flower — additionally involves the convergence of shared apparatus and shared language already described above. These are layers that can build on one another when all are present, not stages every appearance must pass through, and not one of them, present or absent, is more fundamental than the others or is what the flower ultimately, truly consists of. For the fully human case of consciously recognizing and naming a red flower, the eye's structure, the flower's surface properties, attention, prior conditioning, and linguistic convention do converge together, and exhaustive conditionality applies to that specific, fully articulated event exactly as it applied to the chariot's axle: remove what that particular event depends on, and that event does not occur. This is a claim about one richly conditioned kind of appearing, not a claim that every appearing everywhere requires everything language and society can supply.

It is worth catching one specific place this insight is most easily lost. It is tempting to picture the whole formation as a chain: an external object first affects the senses, the brain then processes the resulting signal, consciousness then receives an inner image, and concept finally labels that image 'flower'. Described this way, for ordinary and even scientific purposes, this sequence is harmless and often useful. But treated as a row of independently existing ontological stages, each producing the next by intrinsic causal power, it quietly resurrects everything this book has already spent a full chapter dismantling. Dependent arising is not a row of substantial dominoes, transferring a hidden causal power from object to sense to brain to consciousness to concept. It is conditionality without self-existing conditions at any stage, functioning without intrinsic power doing the functioning, and differentiation without independently existing entities that must first stand apart before they can enter into relation. The stages can be distinguished for the purpose of explanation. They cannot be stacked into a hierarchy of production without the substrate view walking back in through the very sequence meant to explain its absence.

The Flower Returns to the Table

After this much deconstruction, it is worth asking directly what has actually changed, because it would be easy for a reader to expect the flower to have grown thin, provisional, or somehow less than it was. Nothing of the kind has happened. The flower can be returned to the table exactly as it was found. It remains correct to say 'that is a red flower'. It can be watered, given as a gift, classified by a botanist into a species and genus, photographed, remembered, or handed to a child who has no interest whatsoever in any of the preceding analysis. Every conventional function the flower ever had, it still has, without exception and without diminishment.

What has changed is not the flower's usefulness or its vividness, but the assumption that either one depended on an intrinsic bearer standing behind it. The flower is no longer implicitly experienced as a substance to which redness and fragrance happen to be attached. It is experienced, if the analysis has actually been carried through rather than merely read, as exactly what it always was: a coherent, vivid, dependently arisen formation, functioning perfectly, needing nothing further underneath it to keep functioning. This is the same point made earlier regarding relentless negation, now applied concretely rather than as a general warning: dismantling the flower's imagined essence was never a reason to treat the flower itself with suspicion, hesitation, or a diminished sense of its reality. The conventional object was never the problem. The unexamined assumption about what had to be standing behind it was.

Emptiness Is Always Emptiness of Phenomena

One further point needs to be stated plainly, because it is easy to let the whole preceding analysis tip quietly into something it was never meant to say. Emptiness, throughout this book and in Madhyamaka generally, is never a free-floating nothingness, existing on its own, waiting behind phenomena the way a substrate was once imagined to wait behind qualities. Emptiness is always emptiness of something. No phenomenon, no emptiness — the two are not separable, one a container and the other its sometimes-content. Emptiness is a way of correctly seeing phenomena, not a separate phenomenon-free reality standing apart from them, and a red flower emptied of substrate is not thereby erased or replaced by a blank. It remains exactly as vivid, exactly as red, exactly as fragrant as it ever was. What has changed is not the vividness. What has changed is the mistaken assumption that the vividness needed something solid underneath it to be this vivid in the first place.

This is why the closing image of this chapter is not absence but display. Strip away every substrate this three-level analysis was able to strip away — physical and mental, essential and conventional — and what remains is not less than a flower. It is a flower exactly as it always was: insubstantial and luminous — luminous meaning nothing more than the plain, undeniable vividness of appearing itself, not a hidden metaphysical light or a subtle consciousness illuminating the flower from behind, which would simply be the substrate view returning in its most disarming disguise — arising complete, designated together with its conditions, none of them prior, needing no answer to the question of what it ultimately, substantially is, because that question was the only thing standing between the appearance and its own completeness. Reality, seen this way, is not a solid stage on which phenomena occasionally appear. It is a ceaseless display—ceaseless meaning unobstructed (ma 'gags pa), not a series of instants—vivid appearances and their conventional designations, arising together, with nothing behind the display and nothing needed behind it, because the display was never lacking anything to begin with.